I hope to be back in touch with my fine readers on a biweekly schedule from now on, as (applause) I have some help. This book is what I have been doing in my absence (you noticed, I know). Writing that and moving from Texas, where the atmosphere was taking a severe toll on my health, to New Mexico, where I am now getting better faster than I am getting older.

When Bitsy and I returned from watching the sun set on the mountain peaks that looked tiny alongside the supermontane cumulus clouds, we startled a deer from the front yard. And getting healthy, so things are settling down here except for the tourists.

This book began as a description of the basic Facts of Life that seemed to me to be fairly straightforward, (yes there are facts, defined as realities that humans cannot change), organized in a comprehensible way, as my contribution to the future of human kind. The question I posed was: “Given that we know about these Facts of Life, why are we not taking action to protect our children and grandchildren from our parents’ and grandparents’ mistaken relationships with them?

That question turned out to be surprisingly complicated, wandering in and out of my area of expertise (which is basic biology), and involving energy, entropy, naturally evolved systems, and differing world views that are unable to listen to each other. As a result, the book now is a record of the high points in the convoluted path of my extended inquiry that has been helped along the way by innumerable mentors, and by the many obstacles provided by the corposystem, our modern human naturally evolved corpo-political-economic-military-educational social system.

At the Farmers’ Market

The information in this book does not flow gently downstream from its origin in ignorance to its conclusion in a brilliant new synthesis. So far as I know, only one bit of information is original here (see if you can spot it). If the goal is to save ourselves, we don’t need new information. We already know enough, using the history of our mistakes and our existing level of science and technology. So why don’t we go ahead and save ourselves? Because we aren’t, you know. We are making and increasing the same mistakes that caused our Problem in the first place.

Trying to answer that question, this book does not flow. It struggles up, alongside the stream of reality, crossing at the easy places, circling around the waterfalls and rapids, trying to figure out what information is essential and what we can skip over, finally coming to three conclusions that we already knew.

We humans are part of a universe that is composed of naturally evolved systems.

We humans are facing a common biological Problem.

The problem is us.

But Life is not so simple, because the problem is also systemic, and systems can’t be described in any logical linear order, because there is no linear order to a system, nor to outline format. In a system, everything is more or less connected to everything else. Trying to imagine a biologically evolved set of systems, even with computers, is exponentially multi-dimensionally impossible. And if we try too hard to impose our own simple, logical (or illogical) order, we destroy the system.a)

So I will try to describe the most important high-points of my path of discovery, and some of the questions I asked, using a word-map at the beginning of each section, in hopes that the readers can factor the information into their own parallel world views.

Section One – Introduction

Section Two – The Facts of Life

Section Three – Implications

My conclusion is that Homo sapiens will not make it through our upcoming biological bottleneck unless we can learn to discuss with each other our common, inclusive Life of Earth, accommodate our population and economic growth to its pace, and build for ourselves a new social system that envisions our own accomplishments within the needs of the whole rather than the other way around. I do have some suggestions for how it might be possible to do that. We each are experts at our micro-specialties. This book is an attempt to describe the fact-based macro-system within which we must cooperate if we are to help grow a reasonably comfortable human presence within the vibrant and nourishing Life of Earth.

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a) Hello all you physicists, is that Heisenberg’s principle? Is that my reward for all this effort that I finally understand Heisenberg? Or realize that I already understood it all along? That’s not what I was trying to do. I had in mind, like any good activist, to save the world with my own two hands and become a hero! Preferably posthumously.